High Court Harlots

Corruption on the Wisconsin Supreme Court took a
brazen leap forward last week when a majority of the justices officially went
on record in favor of accepting millions of dollars in bribes.

That is a slight oversimplification of the court’s
action—but very slight.

Consider this: Four of the seven justices approved a
rule allowing them to accept millions in campaign contributions from special
interests without being required to remove themselves from cases before the
court involving those contributors.

Even more shameless, the rule the justices approved
was actually written by two of the richest business lobbies in the state that
make enormous contributions to Supreme Court races: Wisconsin Manufacturers
& Commerce (WMC) and the Wisconsin Realtors Association.

The business groups wanted assurance that the
Supreme Court justices they buy stay bought. It doesn’t do any good to buy
Supreme Court races if the justices you put on the court have to recuse
themselves from your cases just because they have blatant conflicts of
interest.

It should come as no surprise to anyone that the two
justices on the court who have been charged with corruption voted with the
majority.

Justice Annette Ziegler was reprimanded by her
colleagues on the Supreme Court for failing to recuse herself from cases as a
circuit judge involving a bank where her husband was on the board of directors,
a bank that also had loaned her and her husband $3 million.

The other ethically challenged justice, Michael Gableman,
is currently facing charges by the Wisconsin Judicial Commission of lying about
his opponent, former Supreme Court Justice Louis Butler Jr., in ads that
falsely accused Butler
of being involved in releasing a child molester who then assaulted another
child.

In addition to their own unethical histories,
Ziegler and Gableman also received millions of dollars in campaign
contributions from the WMC, which wrote the rule allowing justices to receive
millions from the WMC and still rule on cases involving the WMC.

Within months of her election, Ziegler paid enormous
dividends to the WMC by writing a majority decision granting $265 million in
tax refunds to state businesses in a case WMC had identified as one of its
highest priorities.

No one expects Ziegler and Gableman to suddenly
start acting ethically. But the two other justices who joined them—Justices
David Prosser and Patience Roggensack—should be ashamed of themselves.

Because state Supreme Court justices serve 10-year
terms, voters embarrassed by the current corruption of the court won’t have an
opportunity to shift control of the court from the unprincipled
Ziegler-Gableman majority until 2011, when Prosser’s term expires.

Buying Justice?

The state’s ethics code for judges previously stated
that judges had to recuse themselves from cases if their impartiality could
reasonably be questioned. The rule approved by the four justices last week
inserts a contradictory amendment declaring that campaign contributions
alone—no matter how enormous—aren’t enough to require a judge or justice to
step aside.

The majority rejected a rule proposed by former
Supreme Court Justice William Bablitch and the League of Women Voters that
would have defined conflicts of interest resulting from campaign contributions.
The rule would have required judges to recuse themselves if they received more
than a certain dollar amount from one of the parties involved in a case.

By refusing to set any limits at all on the amount
of money they can take from those who have cases before them, the court
majority openly defied a decision earlier this year by the U.S. Supreme Court.
In a 5-4 decision last June, the U.S. Supreme Court said judges must recuse
themselves from participating in cases where one of the parties involved has spent
huge amounts of money to get those judges elected.

Writing for the majority, Justice Anthony Kennedy
said the decision resulted from “extraordinary” circumstances in a West Virginia case where
a corporate business owner spent $3 million to elect a court of appeals judge
who then reversed a $50 million judgment against the businessman’s company.

Anyone familiar with the campaign contributions to
elect Ziegler and Gableman to the Wisconsin
court knows those circumstances aren’t particularly “extraordinary.” In Wisconsin, that’s
business as usual.

Gableman snidely claimed the new rule simply
rejected “this almost implicit assumption that I hear … that somehow candidates
would somehow be tempted to make improper decisions based on something as low
as $1,000.”

Gableman’s argument recalls the old joke about a guy
approaching a woman on the street and asking if she’ll have sex with him for a
million dollars.

The woman says she’ll have to think about it. So the
guy says, “Well, then, how about five bucks?” The woman is highly insulted and
exclaims, “What do you think I am?” He replies: “We both know what you are.
We’re just quibbling about the price.”

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